Outside - Helen Jane Long

So this appeared on one of my Spotify "Discover Weekly" playlists - which was cool considering it was sandwiched between an alt country track and an EDM remix. So yeah - Spotify for the win! (with human curation added as a top level!)

This is pretty short for the Essay Writing Playlist but it is most definitely one of those ones that you can put on repeat (as I am doing now) and it loops beautifully on itself. I was writing to this over the weekend and it has this wonderful build to it - in essence it's 4 ascending notes but what the composer does is play with the intensity and the instrumentation so that you can listen to it for hours and not get bored.

It's wonderfully cinematic too - when the full orchestration kicks in around 1:00 minute it conjures up visions of hordes scaling walls - well - at least to my GOT brain - but within a few seconds she's backing off the intensity only to build it up again and back off and build again - all throughout the piece - if you're looking for a track to get you going and keep you going - you should totally take this out for a spin!

You can learn more about Helen Jane Long here:

About the Curator: Andrew McCluskey

The first visual memory I have is that of the white upright piano in Singapore, Hell and the dark forces lived at the bottom, Heaven and the Angels at the top. They would play battles through my fingers and I was hooked.

Although I've always played, I haven't always been a musician. Most of my twenties were spent working with people, buying and selling and learning how the world works. It was in my thirties that I came to America and focused on music and began to develop music2work2.